New York: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center, or MDC Brooklyn also known as ‘Hell on earth ‘, which holds gangsters and drug traffickers among its 1,300 inmates, news agency AP reported.
President Maduro, who was captured and flown out to the US the other day, is not the first president of a country to be locked up at MDC Brooklyn.
The former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, spent time there while on trial for trafficking cocaine into the US.
In December, president Trump pardoned Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in jail.
MDC Brooklyn, where people awaiting trials in federal courts in Manhattan and Brooklyn are usually held, has housed notable inmates including music celebrities R Kelly and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
The inmates currently doing time at the jail include Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, co-founder of Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
The jail, usually described as ‘hell on earth’ and ‘ongoing tragedy’, sits not far away from the Statue of Liberty in an industrial area.
Notorious for rampant violence, MDC Brooklyn was in the news in 2024 after two inmates were killed alongside reports of jail workers having been charged with ‘accepting bribes providing contraband’.
Alongside, the centre’s poor amenities came to fore after a crippling power outage in 2019 in the facility left inmates facing ‘cold darkness for a week’.
The federal Bureau of Prisons, however, recently said it had worked to improve conditions, claiming that ‘In short, MDC Brooklyn is safe for the inmates and staff’.
It is reported that authorities have taken measures to ‘crack down on crimes inside the lockup’.